The Day of the Backups (Oh yeah!)

Today was something like a "Day of the Backups". It started a few days ago already actually, when HelMUG (the Greek Mac user group) had a break in at their PHP site. Probably SQL injection, but that kind of stupidity aside, it's another story I wanted to tell. The story there is that I had set that machine up a long time ago to make a backup of the SQL database every morning, then encrypt that backup with PGP and transfer it to my server with rsync. Sure came in handy just now. Even if the vandals had gained access to the drive they wouldn't have been able to tamper with the encrypted remote backups.

The second case was when this I started this morning with the last preparations to replace an aging (and acting up) server at work. There is a lot of data on it (as in "many gigabytes") and the fastest way to transfer the current set of data to the new machine was to unhook the backup drive and hook it up to the new server. Except the daily backup on that backup drive wasn't readable. Everything appeared to be there, but the files couldn't be read. Moved the drive to another computer and now it wouldn't even mount, with the directory structure shot. Luckily nothing bad had happened, as the data on the main drive was ok and I was able to move it over using another drive. Lesson learned: It's good to have a backup, but make sure it's working too!

Life in Athens (Greece) for a foreigner from the other side of the mountains.
And with an interest in digital life and the feeling of change in a big city.
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